Distributed Systems Security

Distributed systems have become increasingly common in recent years because of the multiple advantages they bring, such as scalability, flexibility, and reliability. Many modern IT systems are based on a distributed architecture, following the paradigms of public or hybrid Cloud, of Edge Computing, of Peer-to-Peer networks, or even combination of them, such as the distributed Cloud. 

Our research activity focuses on several security aspects of distributed systems. In particular, we work on the design and the implementation of access control models tackling the needs of several distributed systems, also taking into account heterogeneous ones, i.e., systems composed of nodes/devices that are heterogeneous from the computational capabilities and/or from the information types and availability points of view. We also study how to extend such access control systems to cover usage control as well, thus being able to detect and react to violations while the accesses are in progress, hence significantly enhancing the security of dynamic distributed systems.
We also investigate distributed intrusion detection models, aimed at enhancing the accuracy of traditional intrusion detection techniques by taking into account and properly organizing and processing the features collected from all the nodes of the system. Furthermore, the definition of techniques for preserving data privacy in dynamic peer to peer environments, e.g., in Distributed Online Social Networks just to mention one, is a further research topic of our interest.